“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”- Ken Robinson

Supplemental Materials

Appendix 2: The Token Economy System

The Token Economy System is described in Chapter 4 (page 68) and again in Appendix 2 (pages 305-307) of Your Creative Brain. This system of rewards has been shown to reliably change behavior in clinical settings. It can also provide an incentive to help you practice accessing different brainsets.

The Secret Garden guided visualization is a good exercise for enhancing your ability to generate vivid mental imagery in several sensory modalities. It is described on pages 109-110 of Your Creative Brain. Try completing this exercise four or five times over the period of a month. In between each session, think about different trees, shrubs, and flowers you would like to have in your secret garden. You may get ideas from magazine photos, nurseries, or visits to actual gardens and woodlands. Each time you complete the exercise, try to see, hear, smell, and feel your garden in more vivid detail.
As an added bonus, you will find that visits to your secret garden will reduce stress!

The Mental Holiday visualization is described in Exercise 2 on page 117 of Your Creative Brain. This quick exercise (about three minutes in length) will help you to enhance your ability to generate vivid mental imagery across the sensory modalities of vision, hearing, and smell, and touch. This exercise is also a great stress-buster!

One of the best ways to train yourself to generate creative ideas is to practice divergent thinking exercises. Divergent thinking is described in detail beginning on page 125 of Your Creative Brain. Several divergent thinking exercises are described beginning on page 148. After you have tried these exercises, you may want to train further in this area. I have set up a Divergent Thinking Training Program that you can print out. You will practice two divergent thinking tasks each day for seven straight days. Each task will take you three minutes for a total of six minutes per day. It is a small amount of time that will produce big results in the way you creatively think about everyday items and events!

Important! Only open one Day of the Program at a time. Do not turn the first page of each day’s Program until you are ready to do the exercise!

Spending more time doing things you love increases positive mood. It also enhances intrinsic motivation and has a beneficial effect on creative thinking. The Daily Activities Calendar, described in Exercise #3 on page 253 of Your Creative Brain, is a tool that can help you increase positive mood and motivation.